It happened to me the first when buying high end skin care products for my wife.

Received a product that was in the same bottle and branding but very different from past items.

I now buy direct for expensive items and only buy crappy toys and charging cables from Amazon.

I haven’t had fake goods, but I’ve had it happen where a generic part seems to get substituted for an OEM part, even if it is sold by Amazon.com. Things like replacement water filters or vacuum cleaner bags.

Yeah I’ve def had grey market Levi’s jeans. As in, as far as I could tell, made by same company, but clearly had manufacturing defects that I’d never had to worry about from a store or said companies website. So somebody was putting factory seconds in the bin…. As another poster said, items intended for different markets are common too.

Some parts are more common than others.

I got a grey market baseball catchers bag the other day intended for another country. I was replacing my son’s current bag that got damaged and it was like a completely different product.